A Night at the Opera
by Imbelossien
Summary: •59• Memories occur to Gokudera in vivid flashes of light, sound, colour, light, music, light.
1. The Burial of the Dead

**A NIGHT AT THE OPERA  
_QUATTRO STAGIONI IN QUATTRO CITTA_**

**_Stagioni 1: Primaverile (spring), Napoli_**

_NOTES: SPRING in the "Four Seasons in Four Cities" Project. This is divided into five parts, which __**aren't**__ meant to follow each other in direct chronological order (i.e., exactly a year each, etc). _

--------------------------------------------------------

**I. The burial of the dead  
(_or, Easy come, easy go )_**

Memories to Gokudera occur in brilliant flashes of scenery, as if a powerful spotlight from somewhere turned its beam light years back, focusing on an instant or a smell, a sound or a mnemonic trigger. Smells and sound, in particular, are vivid markers and he didn't like to admit that these overcame him in a staggering wave when he encountered them. Everything as he sees it is preserved; he can even mouth the words spoken or enact the motions as if he had rehearsed them all his life.

Sundays are hyacinths and rainwater for Gokudera. The Camorra manor is sprawling and beautiful, all white Corinthian pillars and Mediterranean façade, overlooking the church and the town square. If it had not been the headquarters of the mafia family of its namesake, it would have already been a part of the city's famous sites (and the city had many of these), and it was the envy of all the interior designers and architects that came to visit. Some short yards away from the property, the smell was the first to greet the welcome visitor: the lilies of the field, growing in tall verdant stalks, nodding always towards the direction of the house.

She was always waiting for him in the music room. After the stuffy warmth of morning mass (being pressed between all the old people and his bossy _fratello maggiore_, the bodyguard his father assigned for him) he would storm into the house and ascend the staircase to the east wing, and he always seemed to _know_ she was there.

"My little tempest," she would greet, resplendent against the pale window light, and he would run to her, ruining his Sunday shirt as he clung, breathing in her scent of a thousand hyacinths. "You're rumpling your shirt," she would reprimand softly (for some reason he remembers the key of E in one of the upper octaves), or "you forgot to brush your teeth again, didn't you?", but he would drown it out with his inane babble of stories about his doddard of a home tutor, or the new strategic game he beat his bodyguard at. He would tell her how he'd hurt his head, how he knew Shamal was sneaking up on him because he could _smell_ the man around the corner, how he loved the fireworks that frothed in the sky above the opera house.

She would sit and listen to him and when he was quite done (when he had either run out of steam or forgotten what his point was), when he had spent himself in fury or excitement or whatever passion his story drove him into, she would take his hands. She would take his small boy-hands in hers, and for some minutes (which probably was only a few seconds but which, even to his older self felt like an eternity) there would only be silence.

Her scent filled the room and there was always a place for him beside her on the piano bench. He didn't know back then the names of the light little sonatas they played together––she reaching for the black keys that were then very difficult to press––but he knew this was her music, and even when she translated the Japanese titles to Italian, he still wanted to know how to say them the way she did.

"It sounds funny when I say it," he would pout, when years later he would be speaking the same language with startling ease. "Teach me how to say it properly!"

"You'll learn how to say it," she had replied, reaching over to correct his fingering. "Bee-bo-no-a-ohh-zoh-ra." One note for each syllable.

She would bend over him, and her long hair fell on either side, and it seemed to Gokudera a subtle curtain from which only light could pass through.

* * *

Another Sunday. A cold front had moved in from the coastal area, and the entire landscape was a wash of grey. Weak but persistent rainfall drifted to and fro on heavy grey clouds. The smell of grass pervaded his senses, and it continues to do so when he walks across the Namimori grounds after a downpour, closing his eyes and gathering the fragments of that day on the hill.

He does not remember how long he sat at the piano, only that the song was playing again and again, the only thing he could hear. It was humid and any second soon, there would have been rain. The sheet music lay open in front of him, from which he was going to surprise her; he had picked up the melody from memory and had played it "his way"; that is, he had improvised by playing completely with the white keys, foregoing the black (he hated half-notes) which he could not reach properly yet.

The Turkish doctor was at the door, stark white against the black wood.

"Come now. It's time."

White gravestones pointing upwards from the dead green of the grass. Years later he would find that they had buried her immediately, barely even piecing her together and without the dignity of last rites. He would find out that there was no blaming the rain-streaked roads that hugged the cliffs, that it had been his father's people who had done it, displeased with what she let slip in the media about her "family in Posillipo". Nobody would question the public disappearance of the up-and-coming half-Japanese pianist; the city had many of them.

The doctor brought white lilies in a bouquet and laid them down on the crude white marker that was supposed to be her (years later he would know that there wasn't a body under the headstone). Already the city was forgetting her; no sign of clear skies or the white heat of high noon, clouds clustered so tight that no sun could have squeaked through. The sweet, sickening smell of so many hyacinths and so many of the dead under the grass made him gag. He wanted to ask the doctor why he couldn't even see her before she'd gone, but he forgot the words.

"A-o-zo-ra." One finger for each syllable, just as she had taught him.

The doctor had looked at him, puzzled.

But the smell of the flowers blocked everything else, while the song he would have played for her exploded in a furious crash of keys in his head.


	2. A Game of Chess

**A NIGHT AT THE OPERA_  
_**

-------------------------------------------------------

**II. A game of chess  
(or, _A Devil put aside for me_)**

"Mamma said you can only use the music room when she's not around. She hates listening to bad music. You can't play anything else."

Small girl, the perfect incarnation of the don, only sharper, the little princess of the Camorra¿. Gokudera doesn't remember much of his half-sister until after the accident, until after everything that was once familiar to him had suddenly become too large, too alien, too unpredictable. They had replaced his _fratello maggiore_ immediately after the incident, and he was dragged to Sunday mass at a different time, apart from the rest of the family.

Now this little dark-haired, quick-tongued _stranger_ had materialised in the place of his mother, to tell him what he could and could not do, where he could and could not enter. The mansion––where before he ran heedlessly through the hallways without a care––was now dotted with invisible demarcations and split into marked territories. She always seemed to be the one telling him off, however, and he rarely saw the woman he was taught to call "Mamma" (he never did).

But he would not have his half-sister take the music room. Bianchi moved wherever she liked and as she pleased, while he inched his way around the house, but this room––and the piano, her piano, now his––could not, should not be touched by anyone else.

Gokudera glared at her rebelliously, fingers crooked, arming himself.

Bianchi crossed her arms. "Well, she's here now," she quipped, which meant _You have no place here, this has become my territory._

He released a sharp volley of allegretto notes in retaliation. _This room belongs to the one who can use it._

He had since learned what the terrible gleam in his sister's eye, the twitch of her cheek and the slight downturn of her lip meant. Bianchi was the perfect child-self of the _Camorristi_'s bigger bosses. She was quick to understand the langauge of their way of life, and the delicate politics that existed between "family". She had their father's discreet cruelty. She stared at his defiance, livid but silent, and he in his ignorance took it for defeat.

"You can't play anything else," she said, trembling, but he didn't hear her, banging away on the lower octaves, burying whatever she would have said to him––a warning, now that he thought back to it––in a steady stream of sound.

He did have fair warning, in the form of all the small animals that seemed to turn up in places where he would find them. All of them were either inside, or in paths leading to the music room. _The family cat_, he had thought, knowing the inexplainable feline trait of killing smaller game and, without further damaging the carcass, presenting it to the acknowledged master.

It wasn't to different from how lower gang members showed the profits of controlled areas to the Don, and the Don in turn tendered the results to the other _Camorristi_ bosses in the quarterly conclave. On the one hand it deferred to the master that _this is what I do for you._ On the other hand it is also proof of what the lower man could do, when territories were breached.

He wrinkled his nose and had the butler remove them, or toed them aside when they got in the way. They all smelled strange though, sweet like the milk he took for breakfast, like nuts¡. His room smelled the same too, his towel, the biscuits in the piano room. And while it wasn't as cloying or as vexing as the scent of a corpse, it annoyed him. It bothered him; much as it was most probably the cat (as she had done it before) there was something else he had missed. If his sister inherited their father's cunning streak, he had the don's penchant for sharp observation.

"Is he alive? Is he alive or not? Don't just stand there, get my kit! The poison kit on the dresser in my room!"

Shamal bending over him, beyond a haze of white, as if some blanket or shroud were pulled over his face, and he was looking through the strained fabric at what was beyond. The breakfast table in utter chaos; the maids weeping in the corner, the other fratelli yelling and waving their guns, while other members from elsewhere in the house rushed in and yelled even louder, tried to put order to things. Shamal's face was overhead now, but even the doctor's distinctive scent was dulled entirely. The uproar was a muffled 'jug-jug'¬ in his ears.

"His eyes are turning milky. It's a mild seizure, someone give me a spoon so he doesn't bite his tongue!"

Hard metal slipped in between his teeth, making a loud clanking sound in his head. Shamal pressing a breathing device to his face, oxygen being pumped in from somewhere, invading his lungs, pulling them up and pressing them down again in a violent act of respiration. Something dribbled from the side of his face, but all he could focus on was the world beyond the shroud.

"Milk! It was in the milk. Throw out the every gallon you find in the kitchen! You. Boy. Breathe. That's right, you can hear me. Breathe deeply."

_What is that noise. What is that wind blowing through. _

He turned his head feebly in his milky world, his head drooping like a heavy, heavy note. There was only one other person in the dining room that wasn't either red in the face and threatening murder to every named gang in Naples, or running about calling out the saints' mercy. Bianchi sat making slow work on her morning croissant, observing everything with the satisfaction of a commander who had won a war.

Her narrowed eyes watched him malevolently, dark in her almond-shaped face.

* * *

Notes for "A Game of Chess" :

➊ Camorra_ »_ are essentially a unified group of mafia families in the Campania region, with a base in Naples. Within the Camorra are family heads, or bosses, one of which is Gokudera's father. They have ties to the powerful Cosa Nostra syndicates in southern Italy. It was for their existence, as well as for the fact that Naples is the centre for music (59) and the best pizzas and coffee in Italy (Bianchi's beginnings).

➋ _Nuts_ » traces of cyanide leave a smell of crushed almonds. Almonds soaked in milk is also a favourite addition to morning muesli/ oatmeal grains. Prolonged exposure can lead to stiffening of joints (which may explain 59's eventual quitting of his piano playing. A huge dosage directly taken (i.e., Hitler and Msr. Jeremiah de Saint-Amour, also a chess player) can cause seizure and the like, and can be fatal.

➌ _Jug jug _» from "and the world pursues...Jug jug to dirty ears'. Scattered references also to the conversation in "The Wasteland."


	3. The Fire Sermon

**III. The fire sermon  
_or, FIGARO, MAGNIFICO_**

**_....................................................................................._**

"You have a pianist's hands."

The doctor had a way of saying things that always sounded like an irreversible insult. What Gokudera didn't understand was how the same thing had been said to his mother and it was the brightest of praise. He glared at the man.

The dynamite was a slightly modified one from the standard-issue explosives, made lighter and suitable for fighting. He rolled one clumsily in his grip. He held it dangling from the fuse. Shamal snorted and pulled it away from him, flipping it lightly as he did so, and catching it between two large fingers. The thing fit in between them, a missing member.

"What a lame answer! Why can't I get a sword, or little remote-controlled daggers, why'd I have to get...FIREWORKS."

The doctor's eyebrow arched ever so slightly at the last word, but the childish contempt was naturally forthcoming. It was true, the boy had as-yet small hands, but their strength and dexterity for such an age was due to the pieces the boy played on his instrument. A sword would have been too cumbersome for him, and fistfighting was for hands better used to curling inward into themselves defensively.

That was the boy's problem, Shamal diagnosed (and he was precise in his science) early on; the need to stand out, the need to be flashy, to do things with a bang.

_Well._

The boy stared outward to the port, where they could see it from the veranda of the mansion, where the ships came to dock at the violet hour. It was warm enough now at least to stand outside against the sea, and the thawing rains had decreased their presence in the south. He was glaring now at his own hands, which he spread outwards, fingers splayed; he would do the same thing years later when, in a forest clearing with barely any practice bombs left to work on, he wondered how he could possibly achieve great things with such small, mid-ranged weapons?

But of course this sheltered mafioso's son wouldn't understand. A bomb in one's possession meant protection, but to Gokudera, these were simply the ugly origins of the pyrotechnics that bloomed above the Teatro after a major opera. This boy went to sleep to the lullaby of the city's finest musicians, not to neighborhood talks of invasion. Throwing a bomb in the doctor's old Turkish village meant you controlled the distance between yourself and your opponent, and the explosion that followed covered the footfalls of one's retreat, one's attack.

Shamal would have to take a different strategy, show the boy that what he already had––his music––was perfect for what he would soon learn how to master.

"You have a pianist's hands," the doctor said again, meaning that the boy would make a dangerous art of this, that the bombs would not simply be just a tool for survival. "Long fingers, like candles. Which means you'll understand the handling of this weapon fairly well."

Gokudera's eyes went wide as Shamal raised his hands, a maestro before his skeptic audience. Dynamites tucked between his fingers like the half-notes on a keyboard, he released them with a sudden jerk of his arms, and music erupted in the thin air of the evening.


	4. Death By Water

**IV. Death by water  
_or, ANY WAY THE WIND BLOWS (DOESN'T REALLY MATTER)_**

**_--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------_**

"You look awfully young for a member of the crew."

If the old man had not uttered a word, he would not have known anybody was there. Fighting to control his badly startled reaction, he turned as he walked down the wharf and acknowledged the speaker. The old man was sitting slumped in the shade of some wind-battered waiting shed, directly opposite the wharf and with a good view of whoever was sneaking out from below the main hold. Despite the noontime heat, the man was in black trousers and a shirt carelessly buttoned shirt, looking for all the world like he had just woken up from a drunken stupor. He raised a hand in the lazy manner the people of the south were known for, whiskered face spreading to an amused grin. A cumbersome ring glinted feebly in the light as he did so.

"You look like a cabin rat, though."

It had been several long hours in a cramped crate that he had spent in the hold of a cruise barge, and he had endured its passengers' loud revelry. Now that they had docked south of the Campania region, he thought to make a stealthy getaway, before any of stevedores noticed an extra hand on board. Or that his speech was laced with a Neopolitan accent (all the passengers were Americans) and that he looked every inch a teenager, and that no teenagers were allowed alone on board this cruise (because they did questionable things when they stopped at port).

"Who are you calling a cabin rat, you old tramp," he snarled back, turning away and making for a small crowd that had gathered near one of the yachts at the far entrance. If he could shake the old homeless one's attention off before he attracted any of the nonchalant port staff, he would be free, finally, and could carry on what he came down to the Sicilian isles for.

The dry, amused chuckling followed him, and from the corner of his eye, he saw that the old man had kept up with him leisurely. "Smelling like a rotting crate in the very bottom of a beautiful liner, looking like you've just escaped from a _gato capo_, the dangerous top-cat, scurrying down this decent, lovely little sun-kissed patch of Catanian port hoping nobody would notice you and that this old tramp could possibly look the other way––a cabin rat."

He shot the old man a vicious look from his shoulder, but not once ceased his pace. Thankfully another ship that was docked nearby was ready to leave, and a handful of port hands had come down to help with the moorings; Gokudera thought of losing himself there. He increased is pace to almost brisk-walking, the naked springtime sun warmer in the Mediterranean making him feel more ubiquitous; the battered hatÖ he'd picked up could only do so much to hide his hideous pale hair, but with his Asian stature and his mother's eyes on his head––cause to turn heads.

"Go away, old man," he muttered roughly, "go to hell." Some stevedores were idly walking along the the opposite path, he'd noticed, panic rising.

The old man's grin widened. "And I would say_ Va fa Napoli_ÖA, except that, in your case, well, that is where you're from isn't it?" Grey eyes creased in amusement. "Cabin rat."

The tone was cheeky, playful, and something Shamal would have said to him in a slightly snarkier way, but in his current state Gokudera was in no mood to jest. He pivoted on his heel with a very vulgar rejoinder (something Shamal also taught him) teetering at the edge of his tongue as he opened his mouth, when the nearby loaded ship bellowed its departure. It was a long, prolonged B flat that carried across the port and drew well-wishing shouts from those who were present. Stunned, Gokudera trained his attention to the slowly departing ship.

The old man approached. "Now _that_ is on its way to Rome. Looks like a typical inland barge, doesn't it? Old mechanisms, that thing, but works like a charm. I remember it from when my very own papan carried me on his shoulders to watch its first voyage. Holds far more than three liners combined, and worth thirty thousand more of it too."

The old man was right beside him now, and it was then that Gokudera realised how small he was. How, suddenly, a sense of something immense but hidden had rippled about him like a leviathan under water; but it was a warm sensation, different from the oppressing aura of burly men who hung about in seedy areas like alleys and thoroughfares and piers like these. It made him want to relax a little, yet it filled him with energy. It made him want to believe that this was a safe place, not a port controlled by one of the most powerful families in the mafia underworld, made him feel that he was not an intruder, but was in fact rather expected.

If Gokudera had known what it was like to have a father––a real one, not the image of the don he had in his memory, nor the halfhearted version of the family doctor––he would have found the feeling very, very close.

Instead, he shook himself out of his reverie. Reminding himself that he had very little time left, that he had to make an impression to the powerful Vongola bosses on whose watch Sicily continued its existence, he pulled his hat lower and prepared to leave. This was not his town. He had no family, would have no family, until he made one for himself. With little money to his name (and even this he had changed, not wishing to call attention to the Camorra lineage which he had grown to despise) and a crude map of this new town, he would be living like a rat.

Nothing really matters. Shaking his head at his own situation, he began to turn away.

"There is a small inn across the basilica's portico, _The Eight Fingers_. Clean place, a transient's place, with breakfast and a late dinner if you speak kindly to the lady at the desk. They're not adverse to cabin rats. Just...no smoking."

There was something about the way the old man said the last few words that stopped Gokudera in his tracks and made him turn around, slowly. The man was standing still, watching him, still in the rumpled dress shirt and the lazy slouch, but the knowing look that he cast cut through the small distance between them smoothly. As if the old man knew he had a pack of cigarettes tucked inside his belt and the cigar-sized dynamites he kept within his person, coated in aluminum foil to avoid detection. As if he could see right through Gokudera, where he came from and who he was, and was passing some sort of private judgement.

"I'll...okay. Thank you."

"I'll see you again I hope, Gokudera of Naples."

He nodded, numbed, and continued his way out of the port and to the city proper, troubled by the encounter for reasons he could not name. Behind him, another vessel announced its arrival; people in large groups streamed out of establishments tucked away by the sides of the street, and Sicily yawned as it shook itself from its siesta.

He did not notice that there was suddenly a crowd everywhere, or that the stevedores patrolling the area languidly had disappeared, or that a room _happened_ to be free in the otherwise packed little inn, good enough and cheap enough for a weeklong stay. He did not notice that the lady at the desk did not question his age (a minor without companions), and that coincidentally there was leftover lunch at the kitchens. He did not notice the same stevedores later play the roles of hallway neighbors, didn't recognise the tall gentleman he ran into at a corner restaurant despite the ring (which glowed blue, bluer than the sky of that late spring day) on the first day he was grudgingly accepted by a local branch gang of the Vongola.

It was only after he corrected the front desk lady's pronunciation on the last morning of his stay, that he'd realised the "old tramp" was the first in the town who had said his new name properly, since he began using his mother's name. It was also then that he'd realised that he never even _introduced_ himself back then, except to tell the man to "go to hell."

-------------

_"Was he a problem?"_

_"Let him go, let him go. In fact, I find him interesting."_

_"I know a Camorristi when I see one."_

_"And I know the pigheaded pride of our friend, the 3rd boss of Naples when I see it in his bastard son. No, no, the boy is no threat at all. I don't think he will even admit to being a part of his former famiglia." _

_"A...rat._ÖB_" _

_"Yes, that's what I told him too. The stowaways these days, always so ill-prepared, and without even a biscuit in their pockets, just lots of useless stolen cash. You are in the middle of the sea, child!" _

_"N...no. I meant, he's a violator then, a dissenter, contra to the Mafia code." _

_"Certainly nothing like that poor boy of the Estraneo." _

_"...he has plans of presenting himself to us."_

Jovial laughter. _"By all means! That's a lot of spunk there. Whoever he'll be serving under will be blessed to have someone with such a passionate drive to set things right for his boss. Someone he doesn't have right now, but he is searching." _

_"Is he really Italian? Some bit of Chinese in his blood. He's not using his real name."_

_"Japanese, the boy is Japanese from his mother. Have one of the groups in the West end look into him."_

_"Leandro does not take very well to outsiders, mainlanders, or young boys pretending they're cugine. That child is all three. He will have a very stormy time of it." _

_"Interesting choice of words. But Leandro will do what Leandro does well. Besides I have a feeling that boy will enjoy it more than anything. He'll be treated like an equal now."_

_"...he certainly seems like the brash type." _

_"The Dark Ages was a terrible time to be before the Renaissance_ÖC_."_

Zafferano was used to his boss' cryptic pronouncements by now (the Vongola intuition bubbled up and broke the surface of regular conversation spontaneously, as it came), but that didn't mean they ever failed to snag his attention, pique his interest.

_"...the--the Renaissance?"_

The Nono simply winked in reply, letting the meaning of his words slip away after the boy with pale, pale hair, who had since then disappeared in the sea of people.

* * *

**_Notes for this chapter »_**

➊ _battered hat »_ the coppola is the standard headgear for Sicilian folks. By extension, it also came to mean 'head' in the general Italian usage, but widely acknowledge to have come from Sicily.

➋ _Va fa Napoli_ » Literally, "go to Naples", which in the vernacular is taken to mean **"go to hell" [ › ]** Its American-Italian derivative is 'fanabala', which is a highly conjugated variant of the original phrase. Here, the 9th teases 59 because the latter apparenly speaks with the Neapolitan accent and has alighted from a liner that has come from the area.

➌ _a rat _» in Mafia lingo, to mean someone who has violated the _Omertà_ code/ethic of the mafia body, and, as a whole, violates the mafia organisation itself. Most of the time a hunted individual, both by his/her family and other rivals who risk being implicated. The 9th is again teasing 59 about him being a stow away ("cabin rat") and him deserting his family (although not violating _omertà)_, though the 2nd meaning doesn't occur to 59.

➍ _Renaissance _» a pun which works better in Italian; from the word _rinascita_ (_re_ for 'again' and _nascere_ to mean 'born'), it means "rebirth", and as a verb, "to be reborn". Essentially what the 9th means to say is that 59 starting over won't be easy, but like a rebirth, fulfilling. He is also foreshadowing the whole idea of 'rebirth' in the series.


	5. What the Thunder Said

**V. What the thunder said  
_or, LIFE HAS JUST BEGUN_**

------------------------------------

_Who is the third who walks always beside you? __-_-T.S. ELIOT

------------------------------------

The last of the city's rainfall always came after the long chilly spell of winter. Winter was rain and sleet and sometimes a flaky kind of snow in the upper hills, but that was alright; the storms that moved across the bay like a rapidly-spreading disease brought thunder, bruising across the hills, and a steady flow of rain. It was the storms that shook the buildings, that ruined the air above and inside the opera houses, the theatres, the dim halls of the mansion.

In the days when she was away (as a child it never occurs to one that 'Bologna' and 'Florencia' and 'home' were actually cities far apart, despite the fact that they were in the same country, or that the major conservatories of the city were scattered and far from their estate) there were things he did that helped him cope. He'd pull the curtains shut tight, or lose himself in the library downstairs where the rumbling didn't sound like it would shatter the high glass windows of the house.

On many days he stayed in the music room, and practiced; terrible fingering pounding on terrible note was at least capable of being corrected, whereas the thunder droned on in an ugly, hair-raising treble. Eventually he grew to learn what the pieces his mother taught him meant in her native tongue, the language he adopted along with his new name.

In the days when the lingering scent of almonds kept him away from the music room, when his pianist's fingers became just a little bit stiffer, and now more calloused, he played on different 'music'. Gunpowder strong enough to swallow the sound of crashing rain was music to him now. The smoke that settled afterwards was the light fading of a prolonged bar that cleared away to reveal the effect of the song: trance, horror, awe.

"Who are you looking for, Gokudera?"

He likes to think he picked up strange habits along the way out of necessity. For instance, Ryohei notices that he sniffs his food before he eats it, sniffs the room when he enters it. _Fastidious to the extreme_, the boxer thinks, but a house of hidden poisons teaches one to be wary. Gokudera hated the whole concept of smelling, of scent, because it could not be controlled, because it was many-sided and deceitful; what was "sweet" and "breakfast" was a vicious half-sister's cover for a crime, while "saltwater" and "brine" and "old wet wood" called up places of a cramped nature, the tossing of a vexed sea.

From the old Latin _sentire_, to sense: a lie. In Japanese it was at least discreetly honest; the same word written differently could also refer to a rising stench. ìıÇ¢, èLÇ¢, ÉjÉIÉCÅB

Wet earth, water after the rain, pale flowers conjured up a city clawing on to what was a comfortable winter, teetering on the edge of a dreaded spring. A spring that coloured each evening bruise-violet, that took a little of what was his, every time it occurred. Playing with missing keys; while one didn't press all the keys on the keyboard to finish a song, he felt like he had been improvising all his life.

The Tenth had the curious look of someone he knew, someone he had met before, but he could not quite place. The brown eyes trained on him now, as they did several long seasons ago, on a pier in Catania, except that they were outside a flower shop, simply passing through after day of school. The pallor of petals slowed time as they erected themselves in the air; and then it seemed as if everything that moved, moved to a sound only he could hear.

_Piano, piano, slowly._

"Is there something the matter? You-you've been looking over your shoulder since we stepped out a-and...are we waiting for anyone?"

It could have been for the bodyguard who chased him down from the church to the car, sluggish in his heels. It could have been for his sister, prowling, watching. It could have been for the shady deals he had the misfortune of running into, of his harsh but brotherly upbringing in the heart of Vongola gangland, it could have been for himself.

Himself, the kid he left behind with the unutterable name and the pianist's hands ("long, like candles"), who disliked thunderstorms as they roared over Naples. Memories occur to Gokudera in powerful bursts of light and sound, not quite unlike an explosion: it tore the coherence of one reality apart, completely, revealing an image that he thought he'd left to die in the abandoned rooms of his past.

To drown, in a forgetfulness that was white like poisoned milk, as incoherent as the words he used to say as a child when he could not pronounce the name of that song: _Cielo blu cielo blu cielo blu_. He looked over his shoulder as a storm looks over its passing, watching to see what was left of him after the rains. After the spring.

_A song I thought I recognised. The right keys. Always an andantino sort of time, with andantino rains that roused the smell of the earth after its finale. A city on the hill. Terrible city. City of scent, city that sent me away. Hell. Va fa Napoli._

He cannot translate it all for the boss of course, and the Italian in the Tenth's features are literally only skin deep for now. But that was alright; so was his. From then on he was Gokudera Hayato ('haya' meant 'falcon', bird of prey, sky-sailor), Vongola trustee, now right-hand man of the next candidate for the Tenth Vongola boss.

To Tsuna, Gokudera simply shrugs and murmurs, "I...thought I saw a cat."

A smile breaks the worried Tenth's countenance, as light breaks through a cloud. "Uri, is it?"

"...Maybe."

His shoes squelched as he turned, the puddles from the last of the spring rains disturbed by his movement, shattering the reflection of blank-slate sky.

* * *

**_FINAL NOTES »_**

YES FINALLY. Sorry about this. But major influences for this was the lovely lovely music of Ryuichi Sakamoto, especially the one he wrote for "Babel", **_Bibo no Aozora [ › ]_**_. _If it were at all possible to insert sound as a backdrop for a fic, then this would be it. All ye easter eggs abound.

...also, Queen. And T.S. Eliot's "Wasteland".

Aozora means "blue sky", but also a metaphor for "clear skies", cloudless skies.


End file.
